nVidia video drivers FAIL, click for more infoDisclaimer: All answers and suggestions are provided by an enthusiastic amateur and are therefore without warranty either explicit or implicit. Basically you use my suggestions at your own risk.

I think he meant an attack that actually makes use of a vulnerability in the cable's firmware.

Not as far-fetched as it sounds, but I think in order to make it work someone would probably need to load hacked firmware into the cable first. DisplayPort spec has a provision to allow USB to be piggybacked on it, though I have no idea if anyone actually implements this part of it; there's all sorts of nefarious stuff you could do with a hidden USB connection into the system. For example... watch for the display to go to sleep indicating nobody's sitting in front of the system and start injecting keystrokes.

The piggyback USB interface (if implemented) could even provide an opening for malware in your monitor's firmware to mess with your system!

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

Haha, I want to do this! Rotating would be difficult, but mirroring left/right would be relatively easy (minimal processing and only one scan line worth of buffering). Or selectively dim areas of the image to make it look like the backlight is failing.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

Wha? We're not taking about just a cable per se, we're talking about an active (powered) adapter. These active DisplayPort to dual link DVI adapters have a built in chip that reclocks the DP signal to make it compatible with DVI (as DP is not the same signal as HDMI and DVI).

As to why you would need a firmware update, I don't know - maybe for improved power management, signal handshaking or for making the adapter potentially compatible with a future DP spec?

Anyway, any device with a built in control chip has firmware (though many may not be intended to be flashed/upgraded)... So what if it is a DP --> DVI converter?

According to the website: "The new firmware increases the threshold in the adapter allowing it to better respond to the signal strength from the graphic card. This is a performance enhancement that would benefit your adapter and we suggest that you update the adapters firmware. "